partnerships
The Signature Is Not the Partnership
Founders treat the signed agreement as the milestone. The execution arrives later, if at all — and the announcement is what makes every honest conversation that follows more expensive.
scaling
partnerships
The Speed Trap: Why the Urgency Driving Partnership Decisions in 2026 Is a Structural Problem
The AI capital cycle of 2026 is forcing founders into joint ventures earlier than any prior tech era. The urgency feels like information. It isn't.
partnerships
The Dinner Is Not the Deal
Founders today are better at meeting other founders than at any point in the history of entrepreneurship. The result is a generation who leave every dinner with twelve new LinkedIn connections and zero partnerships.
partnerships
The Investment Nobody Measures
69% of companies are increasing partnership investment this year. Only 42% can measure what those partnerships produce. The gap is not a tooling problem. It is a belief problem that has been structural since the first conversation.
partnerships
The Partnership You Cannot Measure Was Never Really a Partnership
Sixty-nine percent of companies plan to increase partnership investment in 2026. Only forty-two percent can measure which ones are working. That gap is not a data problem. It is a structural confession about how those partnerships were built.
partnerships
The Year Everyone Decided Partnerships Were the Answer
The 2026 partnership investment wave is the largest scale experiment in partner-led growth the B2B world has ever run. Most of it will fail for the same reason it always has.
partnerships
Why Founders Keep Funding Partnerships They Cannot Measure
69% of B2B companies are increasing partnership investment in 2026. Only 42% can measure what those partnerships produce. That gap is not a technology problem.
partnerships
The Pilot Was Never the Hard Part
Databricks' co-founder named the pattern at Disrupt 2026: the pilot was never the hard part. The same failure architecture is running through founder partnerships, and most founders haven't noticed.
partnerships
The Due Diligence That Matters Happens After the Deal Closes
Approximately 70% of business partnerships fail within the first five years. Every piece of advice written in response tells founders to do better research before signing. That is not where the work is.
founders
The Solo Founder Era Has a Partnership Problem
63% of new C corps in Q2 2026 were solo-founded. That number is shaping operators who have never developed the muscle for evaluating a partner, and whose first partnership will be built on instincts calibrated for independence, not relationship.
partnerships
The Urgency Trap
Partner-led growth accounts for 30 to 50 percent of revenue at leading B2B companies. Founders are reading that statistic and signing deals faster. That is the mechanism that makes those deals fail.
partnerships
The Partner Stack Won't Save You
In 2026, the B2B world has settled on a consensus: partner-led growth is the default model, and the prescribed response is infrastructure. Most founders build the stack before solving selection, and AI means they are wrong at a larger scale, faster.